A great deal of confusion surrounded this
second-rate Italian rifle because there was compelling evidence
that it was not the weapon found in the assassin's lair shortly
after the assassination. Officer Seymour Weitzman, part of the
Dallas police search team, later described the discovery of the
rifle on the afternoon of November 22. He stated that it had
been so well hidden under boxes of books that the officers stumbled
over it many times before they found it. Officer Weitzman, who
had an engineering degree and also operated a sporting goods
store, was recognized as an authority on weapons. Consequently,
Dallas Homicide Chief Will Fritz, who was on the scene, asked
him the make of the rifle. Weitzman identified it as a 7.65 Mauser,
a highly accurate German-made weapon. Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig
was also there and later recalled the word "Mauser"
inscribed in the metal of the gun. And Deputy Sheriff Eugene
Boone executed a sworn affidavit in which he described the rifle
as a Mauser. As late as midnight of November 22, Dallas District
Attorney Henry Wade told the media that the weapon found was
a Mauser.
There is, of course, a significant difference
between a first-class Mauser and a cheap mail-order Mannlicher-Carcano.
It should have been simple to know which weapon had been found.
However, to complicate the issue, three empty cartridges from
a Mannlicher-Carcano were found in the same room as the Mauser.
They were near the easternmost sixth-floor window, close together
and almost parallel to each other. Although this arrangement
made them easy to find, it defied what any experienced user of
rifles knows: that when a rifle is fired, the cartridge is flung
violently away. A neat distribution pattern of cartridges like
the one found on the sixth floor of the Depository is virtually
impossible. It strongly suggested to me that the cartridges were
never fired from the assassin's lair but were planted near the
window, presumably having been fired earlier elsewhere, so that
bullet fragments found in the President's limousine could be
described as having come from the Carcano.
There were other problems with the story that
the Mannlicher-Carcano had been the murder weapon. For instance,
no ammunition clip was ever found. The clip is the device that
feeds the cartridges into the rifle's firing chamber. Without
such a clip, the cartridges have to be loaded by hand, making
fast shooting such as Oswald was alleged to have done impossible.
The Warren Commission skirted this problem by never confronting
that fact.
Complicating the matter even further, the Mannlicher-Carcano
triumphantly produced as the "assassin's rifle" was
found to have a badly misaligned sight. So badly was the sight
out of line with the barrel that an adjustment was necessary
before government riflemen could complete their test firing.
Even so, no rifle expert was ever able to duplicate the feat
the government attributed to Lee Oswald.
Despite these problems, when the smoke cleared
and all the law enforcement authorities in Dallas had their stories
duly in order, the official position was that the rifle found
on the sixth floor of the Depository was the Mannlicher-Carcano,
which allegedly was linked to Oswald under an alias, and not
the Mauser, which disappeared forever shortly after it reached
the hands of Captain Fritz.
But even this revision of the official story
did not explain the third rifle. A film taken by Dallas Cinema
Associates, an independent film company, showed a scene of the
Book Depository shortly after the assassination. Police officers
on the fire escape were bringing down a rifle from the roof above
the sixth floor with the tender care you might give an infant.
When the policemen reached the ground, a high-ranking officer
held the rifle high for everyone to see. The camera zoomed in
for a close-up. Beneath the picture was the legend, "The
Assassin's Rifle." When I saw the film, I noted that this
rifle had no sight mounted on it. Thus it could not have been
either the Carcano or the vanished Mauser, both of which had
sights.
I was not surprised to find that this third
rifle, like the Mauser, had disappeared. But its existence confirmed
my hypothesis that Lee Oswald could not have killed John Kennedy
as the American public had been told. Setting aside the evidence
of two other weapons on the scene, the incredibly accurate shooting
of an incredibly inaccurate rifle within an impossible time frame
was merely the beginning of the feat we were asked to believe
Oswald had accomplished.

pages 114 - 116

About this time, in early 1967, we had an
unexpected lucky break. Dick Billings, an editor from Life
magazine, arrived at the office. He was a slender man with a
quick mind and delightful wit. After talking with me at some
length, he informed me confidentially that the top management
at Life had concluded that President Kennedy's assassination
had been a conspiracy and that my investigation was moving in
the right direction. Inasmuch as Life was conducting its
own investigation, Billings suggested that we work together.
The magazine would be able to provide me with technical assistance,
and we could develop a mutual exchange of information.
The offer came at a good time. I had been wanting
to increase my stakeout coverage of David Ferrie's home but did
not have the personnel to spare, particularly an expert photographer.
We had succeeded in establishing a friendly relationship with
the couple who lived directly across the street from Ferrie on
Louisiana Avenue Parkway. Like him, they lived on the second
floor of a duplex and also had a screened porch in the front.
I described this situation to the Life editor, and within
days a top-flight photographer arrived in town. We promptly installed
him at his observation post on the second-floor porch across
the street.
Meanwhile, out at New Orleans Lakefront Airport,
Lou Ivon had located a former airplane mechanic of Ferrie's named
Jimmy Johnson and had persuaded him to go back to work for Ferrie
but to keep contact with our office. This airport stakeout on
Ferrie produced an early dividend. Ferrie told Johnson that a
package would be arriving for him shortly. A white compact sports
car would be parked squarely in front of the airport administration
building, with the windows up but with the door unlocked. Ferrie
asked Johnson to check every ten or fifteen minutes to see whether
such a car had arrived. When it did, he said, Johnson was to
reach under the front seat where he would find  taped to
the bottom of the seat  a brown package, which he was to
bring to Ferrie.
The car arrived, and Johnson followed the instructions.
When Johnson brought the package into the administration building,
Ferrie took it to the bathroom to examine the contents. He came
out full of excitement and announced that he was going to buy
a brand new car.
This cash apparently coming to Ferrie from
a mysterious source only made more intriguing another fact that
Jim Alcock had uncovered. By serving a subpoena on Ferrie's bank,
Alcock found that Ferrie had deposited more than $7,000 in cash
to his account in the weeks immediately preceding Kennedy's assassination.
One other lead about Ferrie yielded some provocative
information. Ferrie, once a pilot for Eastern Airlines, had been
investigated by a private detective agency. I obtained a copy
of its report. The investigators had maintained a stakeout near
his residence and found that Ferrie was visited frequently by
a man named Dante Marachini.
A simple check of the phone book revealed that
Dante Marachini resided at 1309 Dauphine Street. This was extremely
interesting to me because right next door was the home of Clay
Shaw. I wondered who else might be living next door to Shaw.
Reaching for the red book (which lists individuals by address)
I found that also living at 1309 Dauphine Street was a man named
James Lewallen. I recalled from earlier research that James Lewallen
had once shared an apartment with David Ferrie in the vicinity
of Kenner, a New Orleans suburb.
Now I found myself looking at two unfamiliar
names, Marachini and Lewallen, both of whom had in the past been
associated with Ferrie and both of whom now lived next door to
Clay Shaw. That was something to think about.
Some time later, I came across the name of
Dante Marachini again. I had wanted to talk to individuals at
the Reily Coffee Company who had worked with Lee Oswald or at
a level immediately above him, so I sent Frank Klein over to
the company to get their names and respective positions.
He returned rather quickly. "They're all
gone," he said. "Anyone who ever had any connection
with Lee Oswald left the Reily Company within a few weeks after
Oswald did." He laid a sheet of paper in front of me. "Here
are the names and the new jobs."
I glanced down at the list. One name jumped
out at me immediately: Dante Marachini. He had begun work at
the Reily Coffee Company on exactly the same day as Oswald. Several
weeks after Oswald's departure, Marachini also left the coffee
company and began life anew at the Chrysler Aerospace Division
at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA),
on the eastern side of New Orleans.
I then noticed that Alfred Claude, who hired
Oswald for Reily, had also gone to work for the Chrysler Aerospace
Division.
Then I saw that John Branyon, who had worked
with Oswald at the coffee company, had left for a job at NASA.
At just about the same time, Emmett Barbee,
Oswald's immediate boss at Reily, left the coffee company and
also inaugurated a new career with NASA.
After seeing what happened to all of these
men associated with Oswald at the coffee company and after seeing
Marachini's name again, my curiosity about 1309 Dauphine Street
returned. I called Lou Ivon in and asked him to find out if James
Lewallen, David Ferrie's former apartment mate who now resided
at 1309 Dauphine Street, had been as fortunate as some of the
workers at Reily had been. It took Ivon a couple of days, but
he came back with a now fairly predictable piece of information:
Lewallen had gone to work for Boeing out at NASA. Lou and I kicked
this interesting situation around a bit, and then we both became
curious about what had happened to Melvin Coffee, who had accompanied
David Ferrie to Texas on the eve of the assassination.
Ivon was back the next day. Melvin Coffee had
been hired by the Aerospace Operation at Cape Canaveral.
Perhaps it was mere coincidence that all these
men associated with David Ferrie, Clay Shaw, and Lee Oswald ended
up working for NASA, but I doubted it. I knew by now that when
a group of individuals gravitated toward one another for no apparent
reason, or a group of individuals inexplicably headed in the
same direction as if drawn by a magnetic field, or coincidence
piled on coincidence too many times, as often as not the shadowy
outlines of a covert intelligence operation were somehow becoming
visible.

pages 283 - 287

The government's cover-up and ratification
of the assassination have been aided by a flood of disinformation
appearing in the major media. Dissemination of disinformation
is the last element necessary for a successful coup d'etat, and
it also happens to be one of the specialties of the C.I.A. For
many years the Agency secretly had on its payroll journalists
ostensibly working for the major media but in fact disseminating
propaganda for consumption by the American people. It has also
subsidized the publication of more than 1,000 books. As Richard
Barnet, the co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies,
put it:

The stock in trade of the intelligence underworld is deceit.
Its purpose is to create contrived realities, to make things
appear other than they are for the purpose of manipulation and
subversion. More than two hundred agents ... pose as businessmen
abroad. The C.I.A. has admitted that it has had more than thirty
journalists on its payroll since World War II. "Proprietary"
corporations  Air America and other agency fronts, fake
foundations, student organizations, church organizations, and
so forth  are all part of the false-bottom world that has
ended up confusing the American people as much as it has confounded
foreign governments.

For 25 years the American people have been
bombarded by propaganda pointing insistently to a variety of
irrelevant "false sponsors" as the supposed instigators
of the Kennedy assassination. (False sponsor is a term used in
covert intelligence actions which describes the individual or
organization to be publicly blamed after the action, thus diverting
attention away from the intelligence community.) Americans have
been so thoroughly brainwashed by such disinformation, paid for
by their own taxes, that many of them today are only able to
sigh mournfully to one another that they "probably never
will know the truth."
Meanwhile, an unending stream of news service
releases, newspaper articles, television "documentaries,"
magazine features, and books repetitively reinforce this bewilderment
and continue to point the public's attention in the wrong direction.
The incredible accumulation of false sponsors laid upon the American
people includes Lee Harvey Oswald, the K.G.B., Howard Hughes,
Texas oil barons, organized crime, and Fidel Castro.
The original false sponsor was the scapegoat
himself, Lee Harvey Oswald. Nominated for the role by the intelligence
community, he was formally endorsed by the Warren Commission
and others at the highest levels of the United States government.
However, over time it became increasingly apparent that the lone
assassin fairy tale had fallen apart, and most of its supporters
simply fell silent.
Consequently, I was surprised to find recently
that Time magazine, long an ardent supporter of the lone
assassin explanation, continues to be loyal to the original false
sponsor, Lee Oswald. One must acknowledge a certain magnificence
in the total dedication here, the sustained lack of thought through
25 years. In its August 1, 1988, review of the novel Libra by
Don DeLillo, which although fictional is an interesting and provocative
treatment of both Kennedy's assassination and his alleged assassin,
Time finds fault with the book's argument that "the
plot to kill the President was even wider and more sinister than
previously imagined." There is a simpler possibility, the
magazine window, watched the President ride by, and shot him
dead."
When I read that brief, neat disposition of
one of history's most complicated and significant events, I realized
that there is not much one can say to a publication which obviously
has all the answers.
One of the most intriguing false sponsors is
Fidel Castro. Frequently over the years  particularly when
I was making speeches at universities  I would encounter
people who enthusiastically agreed with me that it was not possible
for Oswald to have killed Kennedy unaided. However, they then
would add that they believed that Fidel Castro had engineered
the assassination. I would answer by examining the logic of this
proposition.
First I would point out that at a critical
time during the C.I.A.'s attempted invasion of Cuba in 1961,
the acting chief of the Agency beseeched the President to provide
jet fighter plane support from nearby U.S. Navy aircraft carriers.
Kennedy refused, and the invasion failed catastrophically. Next
I would explain that during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962,
Kennedy refused to bomb or invade Cuba, as a number of his military
and intelligence advisers urged him to do. Finally, I would remind
the audience that one of the factors helping to resolve the missile
crisis was Kennedy's personal assurance to the Soviet Union that
the U.S. would make no further attempts to invade Cuba, a decision
which deeply disturbed the operational elements of the C.I.A.,
which had been training anti-Castro Cubans at guerrilla camps
in Florida and Louisiana for precisely that objective. At this
point it usually was sufficient for me to ask but one question:
"Do you truly believe that Fidel Castro would have liked
to see Kennedy removed as President, that he would have preferred
to have Lyndon Johnson in power?"
One could pose many more questions to those
who advocate the idea of Castro as an engineer of Kennedy's murder.
Could Cuban communists really have established the necessary
operational base and penetration of key police elements in Dallas,
one of the most conservative cities in the United States? Would
these communists have received the extensive cooperation from
Dallas officials, the F.B.I., and the C.I.A. that the actual
assassins evidently received? And are we really to believe that
Fidel Castro had Lee Oswald hand out his inflammatory leaflets
in New Orleans and later ordered the same fellow to go to Dallas
and kill President Kennedy? Are we to suppose that Castro would
have had only one man working for him? Fortunately, perhaps because
of the very insanity of such a proposition, the false sponsorship
of Castro has faded.
I was aware, of course, of the brief vogue
of the "Southwest oil billionaires" as backers of the
assassination. However, this was never in vogue with me, not
even briefly, because it simply did not fit my initial 
and unchanging  belief that the critical connections were
to the intelligence community. True, George de Mohrenschildt
was in the oil business and was a member of the Petroleum Club
in Dallas. But in my talks with de Mohrenschildt it became clear
to me that he was used  not by the Southwest oil billionaires
but by the intelligence community. His duties were limited to
escort supervision of Oswald, at the conclusion of which he was
dispatched to his "government-oriented" business in
Haiti while the final arrangements were made establishing Oswald
as the scapegoat for the assassination. (See Chapter 4.)
The visit of "Jim Braden" (Eugene
Hale Brading) to the offices of the Hunt family, of Texas petroleum
fame, a few days before the assassination appears to have been
a one-shot deception gambit. (See Chapter 16.) The same kind
of one-time visit to the Hunt offices was made, also just before
the assassination, by Jack Ruby  who was no more in the
oil business than "Braden" was. The intention of these
decoy moves was to fuel speculation that the Texas oil business
might have sponsored the assassination.
Such brief decoy visits reminded me of the
"mis-direction" move with which every major professional
football team commences a number of its running plays. Upon receiving
the ball, the runner takes a half step to his left and, while
the opposing defense is off and running in the wrong direction,
then heads off to his right at full speed. The professional football
players, however, are only amateurs when it comes to mis-direction.
The real pros work in the operations directorate of the Central
Intelligence Agency.
Of course, the primary and most lasting false
sponsor has been organized crime, the Mafia, the mob. Many of
the books ostensibly criticizing the government's official explanation
of the assassination seem designed simply to leave readers with
the firm conviction that the mob murdered John Kennedy. As with
any powerful myth, there are some elements of truth to it. The
C.I.A. has worked with the Mafia over the years, and there is
certainly evidence that many mob figures hated President Kennedy
 and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. And
mob-related individuals do figure in the scenario.